Public Project

Launched at Metal’s Shorelines Literature festival in 2013, Public Record: Estuary is a cycle of audio poems intended to be listened to on walks around the old fishing village of Leigh-on-Sea. The poems are inspired by archival reports of 19th-century Estuary sea accidents. Set against the sights of today’s Estuary, they offer a new perspective on the clash of picturesque landscape and post-industrial edgelands. As you walk, you’ll find yourself immersed in the forgotten lives and colourful past of this “half-marine place”, caught between nature and industry, between ancient and modern.

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Artist’s statement, additional info and full credits:

Public Record: Estuary

Poetry of calamity at sea, set on the Essex shoreline.

“The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.” – Paul Virilio

Public Record: Estuary is an audio poetry cycle inspired by archival reports of 19th-century sea disasters on the Thames Estuary in Essex. The poems borrow the characters, events and, in many cases, direct sampled texts from Victorian newspaper reports and other archived writing. With commissioned music and sound design, and a cast of poets reading the poems, this piece provides an accompaniment to the region’s contemporary landscape.

Public Record: Estuary is based on true events, but it is not meant to express factual information. It is a means of finding poetry clinging to the heart of historical events. It is a way to use events that occurred more than a century ago to alter the way we see the landscape of today. I hope that the sounds, the language, and the ideas in Public Record: Estuary will resonate with the landscapes in which we hear them – sometimes harmonizing, sometimes clashing – but less from a historical perspective than from a poetic one.

That being said, below you will find further information about each of the poems in this piece: the archival sources for the texts, the names of the readers on the audio, and a few background notes from me.

Justin Hopper

Listed sources provided inspiration and, in many cases, texts sampled for the work. Readers are listed in alphabetical order, not order of appearance.

Part 1: High Water Mark

“High Water Mark of Ordinary Tides”
Sources: Inspired by various tracts on British sea law
Reader: Justin Hopper

An introductory poem, this sonnet sets out the themes of the overall piece: false divisions and hand-drawn lines that disconnect people from their places and their selves.

This is one of a few poems in the piece representing perceptions of the Estuary from outside voices. The texts are taken largely from an 1861 article by members of a London naturalists society after their day-trip to Leigh and Southend. It is from a moment when the still-pristine countryside and seascape is first being cut across by rails and bathed in by holidaymakers – the moment between fields and factories; agrarian centre and entertainment hub.

When Sir John Franklin set out from the Estuary in 1845 on his fateful journey to the Arctic, one of his ships – the Terror – lost its anchor off the Essex coast. Forty years after the Terror and its crew disappeared forever, a Leigh fisherman found the anchor, covered in kelp, the ship’s name carved into its wood. Leigh’s church is dedicated to Saint Clement – who died a martyr, thrown into the sea tied to an anchor. The poem joins these two points to sketch a tribute to the dangerous, unheralded lives of those who work the sea.

Change, change, change – of the cultural, natural and technological environment. As Hank said, “I’m gonna find me a river, one that’s cold as ice / and when I find me that river, Lord I’m gonna pay the price / I’m going down in it three times, but Lord I’m only coming up twice.”

Part 2: Shifting of Grounds

“Prologue: Wherefore its Shifting of Grounds”
Sources: Report on the Sea Fisheries and Fishing Industry of the Thames Estuary, published 1908 (data from preceding decade); The Standard, July 26, 1845, “The Late Steam-Boat Accident”; Account of the wreck of the Embleton of Mr. A. Leon Marsh, 1952.
Reader: Adrian Green

The poems in this section broadly comprise a narrative arc about two Leigh fishing families connected through a series of events. This prologue tells of the state of the fisheries, describing a place in transition that sounds familiar to the Estuary today; a mood of uncertainty – of clashes between “low” and “high”; “old” and “new”.

Two 9-year-old boys, one each from the two families this section follows – Cotgrove and Noakes – rescue a drowning girl named Florry Rand from the Creek. Some fishermen superstitiously avoided learning to swim, feeling that it is worse to anger the ocean by cheating its wrath.

A group of Leigh fishermen kill and take possession of a sperm whale caught in the Thames, displaying its body for money at famed fisherman Michael Tomlin’s wharf. Meanwhile, a shanty-like incantation warns us about both forsaking the sea and damning the land.

In 1899 a barque called the Embleton, as it was being pulled out of the Estuary by the tugboat Goole, cut through a small fishing smack called the Violet. Two men were killed – men named Cotgrove and Noakes, who died, as Eliot would have it, “Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, /… I had not thought death had undone so many.” A metaphorical end to the century; a victory of iron, steam and speed over the small ways of wood and cloth.

Each smack and barque / That slips from the Oaze / Into Ray Gut, / Touches with its shadow / The shifting, sallow / Outline of January’s hollow

Chews its clewed-up fingers / Across sea dunes / And whale-roads / That rain, steam and speed / Gut in clunks and grunts. / They feint against January

With timorous gusts, / And counter with time-honed / Thrusts, but the sand’s bones
They all become / In the shadow, becalmed / At stoic Crowstone.

Karma can be slow, karma can be quick: a mere 19 months after the Embleton cut through the Violet, the offending boat was, itself, divided. Not far off the Irish shore, the ocean liner Campania sliced the Embleton in half. Dread and the launch of the 20th century. The invention of the ocean liner was the invention of the divided Embleton.

A voice from London offers, as interlude, a glimpse of Leigh through the eyes of the natural history enthusiast. A foreshadowing, too, of several pieces that revolve around those caught in the nets that trawled the Estuary – fishing nets, and nets of myth and time; of, as Mr. Joyce would have it, “…nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”

John Gillson’s grandson Thomas, only 9 years old, sank in the Estuary, “Taking the oar with him”. The death was shown to be an accident during an inquest into Thomas Gillson’s death, held at the Crooked Billet pub by the local coroner’s authority, the aptly named Mr. Codd. There, the assembled determined that Thomas Gillson died of an accident, and bid John Gillson good luck and congratulations for having survived the storm – at least physically.

London came to Southend in the mid-to-late 19th century – it came, and in some cases, it remained. James Mantle is one of those: an Eastender whose world had collapsed when the church he worked for burned. He visited the Estuary, and left himself in it rather than catch the train back to Fenchurch Street. As travel writers of the time expressed, the waters of the Estuary are “quite as salt as the sea” – where does the sea end and the river begin? Perhaps at James Mantle’s body, washed up in the Creek, “fully clothed except his hat”.

Part 4: A Half-Marine Place

“Frankenstein of the Thames”
Sources: The Open Air, by Richard Jefferies, 1885.
Reader: Stuart Bowditch

“Now, no one is really free / unless he can crush his neighbour’s interest underfoot.” Extracted from Richard Jefferies’ journals of the dimming of nature in an industrial England, this lament sets us up for the final dread: the invention of the shipwreck that comes with the invention of the ship. The industrial Thames, full of barges and full of barging, is calamitous for both wild red deer and fishermen alike. But, less literally, what does liberty mean today? And what is crushed within its ken?

The brigantine Bertha, anchored in the Estuary waterway known as the Lower Hope Reach, is slashed and sunk by the steamship Penedo with the loss of five lives; the unsatisfying verdict in the inquest read that those killed were, simply, “Found dead in the river Thames.” The Thames at that time was filled with ships – so many that a miscalculation of a few inches meant, in this case, the death of five crewmen. Too busy, and filled with too much speed for this tricky territory near the desolate Canvey and Two-Tree islands – islands that seemed to rise out of the river to catch ships unaware in this “low, guilty highway”.

Reclaiming land from the waves: an ancient thought for a place like the Thames Delta. The Estuary and its attendant lands will never be truly “joined permanently to the mainland” – it is a place that withdraws from attempts to pin it down; a place that lives through “neither/nor” convictions as much as “either/or” flexibilities. It is, indeed, half-marine. And the other half?